Art Beats Festival 24

A Broken Voice (Xiaohan Luo)

6min 29s – 16:9

Artist Statement

Using painting and pictorial vision as a starting point, feelings, memories, time, and individual experiences of growing up are the inspirations and themes that motivate my art practice. Leading by the power of language, I embark on a journey to document and observe my interactions and hidden connections with the world and convey them through mediums such as photography, installation, painting, sculpture, etc. They help me invite viewers to join me on a journey of sensation, where time and space interlace.

As my awareness grows, I search for the narrative of the ‘ME’ as a subject, exploring the personal emotions and sensory experiences within images, space, and invisible subjects. Most of my works are reflections of my daily experience, capturing the essence of existence itself and the immediacy of the interactions between myself and the world.

In my recent works, I employ the power of images and paintings to convey my way of seeing through abstraction. I am attracted to the sounds I hear as a hearing-impaired person, as well as emotions evoked in disparate places. The intimate and complex relationship between my hearing and body movement is the core of my recent work. Seeking connections across time and space, I hold the belief that silence itself is a form of sound, representing the essence of my artistic perspective. It is a topic that has long captivated my interest. In A Broken Voice, I focused on my main idea “Hearing by Seeing”, discovering the impact of lipreading on my daily life while recovering from my sudden hearing loss last August.

Xiaohan Luo

Xiaohan Luo was born in 2000, China. She currently lives in London and study Master of Research in Royal College of Art. Her BA is Fine Arts at Jiangsu Second Normal University, China. She also had a Print(MA) in RCA, 2023. She mostly uses time, sensory experience and memory as the themes of her works, and expresses them through paintings, printmaking, installations, photography and moving images.